He’s got gall, he’s got guile!
That’s no lady…
April 25th, 2012 · animals, randomstuff
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Treading Waters
March 14th, 2012 · art, food, people
Today at approximately 1:46 pm, I saw John Waters in the Menil Park. I was walking past on my way to the parking lot, where I was going to check out the Lady Bird Food Truck. (I had the fennel & proscuitto torta and it was yummy.)
At first, I didn’t give much thought to the man crossing the street toward me. He was an older man, small, thin, dapper but not flamboyant. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on any reason why. As he stepped up onto the grass, we shared the briefest of eye contacts, then he cursorily scanned me up and down, and then went back to looking at his phone. Just a normal thing a couple of passersby might do. And then I saw the moustache. A black pencil-thin caterpillar lounging across his upper lip. Not many people sport a moustache like that. In fact, I think only one person does. And his name is John Waters.
But what would John Waters be doing here? And then I recalled recently seeing several interviews with him in the local media. Turns out he is in Houston, and doing a one-man show tonight at Diverseworks, where an exhibition of his art will run for the next month too.
I’m glad I didn’t recognize him sooner. I’d have had to worry about whether or not to say something to him. As it was, there was no time to consider it. We passed each other and I kept walking. That’s fine with me. I don’t know what I’d have to say to John Waters anyway. I’ve only really ever seen one of his movies all the way through (Crybaby, but at least 10 times), and I’d have hated to spoil his time on such a lovely afternoon. Maybe mustering a friendly “Hi,” would’ve been nice, though, whether I recognized him or not. I do wish I’d been better-dressed, though. Somehow I’d rather John Waters not have seen me in my baggy khakis and a ratty old Thundercats t-shirt.
Prague Rock: It’s Pivo Time!
March 8th, 2012 · drink, randomstuff, the cz
In Prague, pivo is the beverage of choice. Pivo is what the Czechs call beer, and it is everywhere. Typically you can get a half-liter of the stuff for as much as a tiny bottle of that fizzy water they like so much.
One night, my friends and I were out on the town, and naturally we had some pivo. Many pivos, in fact. Most of us had been there for a couple of weeks, but one of the guys with us—let’s call him Buck—had just gotten in that day. He was the son of one of our friends, visiting for a few days. His dad had already stumbled back toward their hotel, drunk, asking policemen along the way, “Where’s the river?”—he must have seemed a suicidal nut, but really that was the only landmark he knew how to find his hotel from. Before he left, we promised him we’d see to it that Buck got back safely.
Around 4 a.m., when we were pretty much pivo’d out, we decided to head home. Buck was particularly inebriated at this point and didn’t know his way around the city at all, so we took him to catch a tram that would take him to his hotel. At the tram stop, the schedule told us we’d have to wait about half an hour for the next ride. As we waited, Buck got very antsy, “Let’s get a drink. We need another drink! Where can we get a drink?” The rest of us weren’t so sure. We’d been on the Prague party train for a while, and were getting tired of being out all hours. But it was his first night, and we had half an hour to wait, so I looked around for a Non-Stop. A Non-Stop is what the Czechs call a bar that never closes. They’re everywhere in Prague, so I figured one would be nearby. A block down the street, I saw some neon lights that looked like they might be such an establishment. We walked up and tried the door. Locked. Oh, well, I said, secretly relieved that we could just catch our trams and go home.
Suddenly, a disheveled man shuffled out from under a nearby streetlight. We eyed him nervously: hunched, dirty, and grungy, he looked like a homeless man. He mumbled something to us in Czech and before we could answer or run away, he pulled a huge dungeon-master’s key ring out from under his shabby coat. He thrust a giant key into the door and unlocked it with a clunk. It creaked open slowly, revealing a cramped stairway bathed in red light leading down into the bowels of the building. I inquired of the man as to what we might find down there, using the only Czech word I knew. “Pivo?”
He croaked back in English. “NO. SEX.”
“Oh, no no no no no. Thank you,” I said.
The dungeon master shrugged. Buck perked up though. “Alright! Let’s go!”
“Oh, no no no no no.” We turned back.
“PIVO… 200 CROWNS,” the man rasped.
Buck wheeled around. “Pivo? Alright, pivo!”
We thanked the troll-pimp again and dragged Buck back to the tram stop, explaining that that was significantly more than a pivo would normally cost.
Thankfully the tram showed up not long after. We put Buck on it and sent him on his way. After the tram pulled out, we realized we never told him which stop to get off on.
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One of the Worst Feelings in the World
December 16th, 2010 · randomstuff
One of the worst feelings in the world is when you’re playing Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? and you’re hot on the heels of some pun-named villain and time is running out and you have to take like an 11 hour flight to Kathmandu and then have to sleep all night (what kind of lazy detective to they think I am?) only to find out that you’re in the wrong city and the fat white Bartender at the Nepalese Sport Club is all like “Sorry, I haven’t seen anybody like that around here,” and you’re all like “AAAAAAUUURRGGGGHHHHH! WHY DIDN’T I LISTEN TO ALL THE CLUES!!!” I hate it when that happens.
Another bug post
April 20th, 2010 · animals
An ant just walked across my desk. He was the biggest ant I have ever seen. I smushed him. I don’t feel bad about this.
I don’t have any neat stories about ants, so I guess that’s it.
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Bees
April 19th, 2010 · animals, work
At the risk of being mistaken as amateur entomology enthusiast, I’ve decided to blog about another insect. BEES!
Why bees, ask ye’s? Well, because I saw a bunch of ‘em last week.
You see, one of my several jobs is to fly in a helicopter and take video footage of traffic accidents and housefires and cops tasering themselves (I wish) whenever the regular person who does this is sick or wants a vacation. And she happened to want a vacation last week. So, even though I have another regular “day” job and I was performing in an awesome play, I was also spending two hours a day in a helicopter. It was a pretty busy week.
So one day, the pilot and I are walking out to the helicopter. It’s parked on this little bewheeled palette so they can move it around the airport and stuff. And we’re walking and talking and I’m mentally preparing myself for the gross inside-the-helicopter smell (trust me it is gross) and the nausea and headaches that will most likely accompany my day on the job, when, all of a sudden, the pilot smacks his arm across my chest and halts in his tracks.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when a seasoned professional does this as he approaches a complicated and potentially dangerous piece of machinery he works with every day, I get a little nervous. I was like, “Oh my god, what the hell, the helicopter must be about to blow up or something!” But it didn’t, so I looked at the pilot, who just pointed. I followed his finger to the helicopter, didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“What?” I said.
“There. Bees.”
And, sure enough, below the helicopter, hundreds of bees were busily setting up shop on the palette. I’m not sure what drew them to it; it doesn’t look anything like a tree or a flower or anything. But it is painted with large yellow and black stripes. Maybe they thought it was some giant Motherbee on which they felt instinctually compelled to latch themselves?
Anyway, there they were, buzzing away, and we couldn’t get to our helicopter. So the pilot calls up whoever you call up when these things happens and tells them we can’t take off because there are bees. And I call up the dispatcher who I report to when I’m in the air and tell him we can’t take off because there are bees. Then we just stood there and watched the bees.
A couple minutes later, one of the guys who drives a little buggy around the tarmac all day moving things comes by and we tell him about the bees. He says they weren’t there earlier when he pulled the palette out of the hangar. He too calls someone to tell them that there are bees.
A few minutes after that, two guys pull up in another buggy thing. One of them is bald. Not balding, but, like, wilfully Yul Brynner-ly bald. We tell them there are bees and they drive off.
After a while, they come back, this time in a minivan. Yul is in the back with the sliding door open. Between his legs he holds a bucket full of soapy water. His buddy drives the van around behind the helicopter, and Yul jumps out and tosses the water at the bees. Then they drive off. Apparently, soapy water is a good way to kill bees.
“It’s a shame,” the pilot says, “They’re hard to come by these days.”
It slowly dawns on me what he means. After all, bees are disappearing all over the world. And as I realize that we are complicit in the murder of an entire colony of them, the minivan comes back, and ruthless ol’ Yul takes out the rest of them with another bucket of soapy water. Once the bees were dead, we moved the palette, went through the preflight routine, and took off.
I have to admit, though, it kind of shook me up a bit, this bee business. I mean, what was the rush, really? Was it so important that we get up in the air to fly around, waste a bunch of fuel, and get a few minutes of decent footage that may or may not appear in an inane nightly newscast? So important that we couldn’t wait to call a beekeeper and see if there was any other way to deal with this be problem? Was mass apicide really necessary? It seems it was. But I don’t feel that great about it.
But, then again, it could've been REALLY bad if any of those bees got in the helicopter...
Today we couldn’t fly because it was foggy. Apparently, fog beats helicopter, but helicopter beats bees. But do bees beat fog in this little rochambeau? I don’t know, but they’re no match for soapy water.
Fleas
April 5th, 2010 · animals, food
Fleas like mashed potatoes.
I know this because one jumped off my head into my mashed potatoes at dinner tonight. They had been microwaved to deliciousness in the plastic tub they came in and steamingly served onto my plate. The flea sensed their presence, and dove to his certain doom to enjoy their white, fluffy glory. Either that or they smelled like a dog.
I did not know I had fleas until this happened. I had suspected it, though. After spending an evening in Memorial Park performing at a party for the Bayou City Art Festival, a colleague of mine exclaimed that he had found one. It could have come from the house we were hanging out in at the time, but I proposed that we might have picked them up at the park. The subject changed, however, and the notion was quickly forgotten. Until tonight, that is, when the little fella pulled his half gainer into my dinner.
Fleas flock to me. When I was living with the young lady who is now my ex-girlfriend (YLWINMEG–she’s Welsh, I guess), we had a flea problem. You see, YLWINMEG had a cat, an awesome cat with one eye and a feisty disposition, and this cat happened to get fleas one day. Or I did. Either way, we ended up with fleas in the apartment. AND THEY ATE US UP. The cat and I, that is. We had mad itches in our britches, but the YLWINMEG never got bit once! And because they didn’t bother her and she was the one that usually took care of these things, the we kinda let the fleas stick around for a lot longer than we should have. Eventually, we treated the place, but not before the cat had developed the adventurous habit of playing lava with the carpet and upholstered furniture, disposing her to walk (and sleep) all over the tables, my desk and the kitchen counters. (This, coupled with poop-foot from a careless trip to the litterbox, led to our unfortunate discovery of pooey paw prints all over everything one morning.)
A Few Fun Flea Facts:
- Fleas can live for about 100 days.
- Fleas do not fly. They jump from one place to another.
- A pair of fleas can produce 400-500 offspring in their lifetime.
- A flea can jump up to 8 inches high. That is 150 times its own height. If you could do this, you’d be able to leap over even tall skyscrapers!
Source: Pest World for Kids (yes, that is an actual website)
I once saw an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in which some Argentinian lady had impaled a bunch of fleas on fishing wire attached to a tiny circus model to create a real, live flea circus. She made a movie of them with a camera and this is what I saw (the movie, not the camera). I remember two fleas had had toothpicks tied to their appendages so that as they flailed them around in tiny flea agony it looked kind of like they were having an epic little swordfight.
I wonder if this lady got bit a lot. I kind of hope she did. I also wonder how in the heck she caught all those fleas. I hereby propose that she too unwittingly discovered the siren song that mashed potatoes play on the feeble flea mind, and exploited this for her nefarious arts rather than the good of mankind. Think of all the lives that could’ve been saved had only the learned men of Europe known to pile heaps of steaming whipped goodness outside their city walls!
I took a bath to get the fleas off of me since showering every day doesn’t seem to do it. I thought this might drown them. But, alas, I submerged myself to find nary a waterlogged flea carcass bob to the surface. So I took a shower, just to be sure. Hopefully, I’ve seen the last of these fleas, but I guess we’ll never be sure. Until I have mashed potatoes again, that is.
Flea in Mashed Potatoes (artist's rendering)
Now, you’re probably asking yourself one question: “Why the heck am I reading this guy’s blog about fleas?” But, if you happen to be asking yourself two questions, the other one might be, “What else was fleaboy eating with the mashed potatoes?” And the answer to that, my friends, is one of life’s greatest mysteries… but you might find your answer somewhere else on this page. First correct guess wins a prize!
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Meat Loaf
March 22nd, 2010 · food, music
So: those of y’all who know me know I love me some meat loaf. My mom makes it with brown sugar and ketchup on top. And, unlike a lot of meat loaves I’ve had, there’s no overwhelming tomatoiness to the inside bits. I like it that way.
I also like that singer named Meat Loaf. He has a new video out, and although I still can’t tell why I enjoy it, I most certainly do. (That’s pretty much how I feel about all his stuff.)
Here it is:
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Hey there!
March 11th, 2010 · randomstuff
Welcome to my blog, FELLAS!
I will kick this BLOOG off right with a few words of wisdom from one of my favorite poets:
It’s real, not drama;
Hate pet llamas;
Met Clint Eastwood,
Slapped his mama!~ Sir Mix-a-Lot
That’s all for today. Catch ya laterz, fellas!